There was overwhelming bipartisan agreement on Tuesday night that Gabrielle Giffords' arrival for President Obama's State of the Union address was the most compelling moment of the evening. Watch the footage and there's simply no arguing with that—the Arizona congresswoman looked terrific. Her incredible comeback from a near-fatal shooting one year ago seems all the more remarkable each time she appears in public. (Not that she doesn't face challenges ahead; a video she released over the weekend, in which she announced that she's stepping down from her congressional seat to focus on her further recovery, is equally moving.) Her story is as potent a mix of painful and inspirational as there is, and you'd hope that it could stand as something of an antidote to the poisonous politics of the era.

Which is why some news out of Missouri on Tuesday was particularly stomach-churning: Just hours before Giffords made her way into the nation's Capitol, an unknown provocateur was stalking the halls of the Missouri Capitol, tagging the doors of lawmakers—most of them Democratic women—with images of rifle crosshairs. From the Columbia Daily Tribune:

Orange stickers with an image of rifle crosshairs were found Tuesday on the office doors of several Democratic state senators, prompting an investigation by Missouri Capitol Police, Senate Administrator Jim Howerton said. The stickers were on the doors of all four Democratic women in the Senate—Jolie Justus and Kiki Curls, both of Kansas City, and Maria Chapelle-Nadal and Robin Wright-Jones, both of St. Louis, Justus said. One similar sticker was found on the nameplate outside the door of state Rep. Scott Dieckhaus, R-Washington.

"If anyone thinks this was a prank, it is not a prank," Justus said after discussing the discovery of the stickers on the Senate floor. "You don't joke about someone's personal safety." A sticker also was found on the door of Sen. Victor Callahan, D-Kansas City and the Democrats' floor leader.

Sen. Chapelle-Nadal herself weighed in on Twitter and didn't mince words, emphasizing her disapproval with "#DisgracefulCowards." (Her tweets are "protected" but one was posted by St. Louis Activist Hub.)

It's an apt moment to recall that Giffords once criticized Sarah Palin for using a map that literally put political enemies in the crosshairs. "We need to realize that the rhetoric…for example, we're on Sarah Palin's 'targeted' list, but the thing is, the way she has it depicted, we're in the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district," Giffords said in an interview with MSNBC in spring 2010. "When people do that, they've gotta realize that there are consequences to that action."

We all know what followed.

Palin and other conservatives strongly rejected the notion that their imagery and rhetoric had anything to do with the bloodbath in Arizona a year ago. And no one can know what was truly in the deranged mind of Jared Loughner. But common sense says that when enough targeted political vitriol mixes with enough guns, bad things will eventually happen.

One year ago, as plans for a mass demonstration against Hosni Mubarak's regime circulated on the internet, Egyptians speculated about what might happen on January 25. Would it be yet another futile effort, easily quashed by security forces, or a legitimate challenge to the octogenarian kleptocrat's rule? No one could've predicted, of course, what came next: an 18-day uprising culminating in the overthrow of one of the most powerful strongmen of the Middle East. Now, after a rocky year of military rule, marked by the country's freest and fairest parliamentary elections in decades and frequent spasms of street violence, uncertainty is once again in the air. Here are five key things to watch for as massive crowds flood Egypt's streets and squares on Wednesday:

1. How will the military respond?

Over the past year, the military—in particular, the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces—has gone from respected to reviled among many revolutionaries. After promising to midwife a swift transition to civilian democracy, it has earned the ire of many Egyptians with its brutal crackdowns on dissent and glacial pace of reform. In Cairo and other major cities, anti-SCAF graffiti is plastered on alley walls and facades of government buildings. Even so, SCAF has announced plans for grandiose celebrations on the 25th to commemorate its role in the revolution, replete with martial displays, concerts, and ceremonies to honor officers. After a deadly showdown between military police and protesters killed at least a dozen civilians in December, the military has kept a low profile. An ostentatious return to the spotlight could trigger renewed violence.

2. Celebration, demonstration, instigation

The throngs in the streets will be driven by various agendas. Some will simply wish to celebrate the anniversary. But activist groups—many of whom are calling for a "second revolution"—plan to use the 25th to press their demands for an expedited transition to civilian rule. (As of now, the military leadership is slated to cede executive power by July 1, following the presidential election in June.) To draw any momentum from the day, they'll have to walk a fine line—on the one hand preventing the day from becoming a military pageant show, on the other, suppressing the militant urges within their own ranks. Violent clashes in November and December cast a bad light on the revolutionary crowd for many Egyptians, who view its continued agitation as unnecessarily destabilizing. They risk losing support if things get ugly.

The Obama administration will soon explain why it believes the president has the authority to kill American-born terror suspects abroad without charge or trial, Newsweek's Daniel Klaidman reported Monday. US drones have already killed American-born Al Qaeda propagandists Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, and, in a separate strike, Awlaki's 16-year-old, American-born son Abdulrahman. In October, the New York Times' Charlie Savage reported on the contents of a secret document prepared by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel that laid out the adminstration's legal rationale for killing the elder Awlaki. But the Obama administration has yet to publicly explain its controversial argument, and Savage and the Timeshave sued the government after trying and failing to obtain the OLC memo through the Freedom of Information Act. Now, Klaidman says, the White House seems poised to explain at least some of its reasoning:

In the coming weeks, according to four participants in the debate, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. is planning to make a major address on the administration’s national-security record. Embedded in the speech will be a carefully worded but firm defense of its right to target U.S. citizens. Holder’s remarks will draw heavily on a secret Justice Department legal opinion that provided the justification for the Awlaki killing.

But when you read further down in the Klaidman piece, it's clear that the government isn't preparing to say much:

An early draft of Holder’s speech identified Awlaki by name, but in a concession to concerns from the intelligence community, all references to the al Qaeda leader were removed. As currently written, the speech makes no overt mention of the Awlaki operation, and reveals none of the intelligence the administration relied on in carrying out his killing.

It's hard to see how this will make anyone on either side of the Awlaki debate happy. Secrecy hawks may be upset by even this much disclosure, and civil libertarians will wonder why the administration is speaking in vague generalities. Savage and the Times will almost certainly continue their lawsuit seeking the OLC memo about the killing, which is what's really at issue here. The Obama administration was willing to release the OLC memos related to George W. Bush's most controversial actions—namely, the brutal interrogations of non-citizens. It will continue to be difficult for the Obama team to argue that memos about their most controversial actions, the killing of citizens without charge or trial, should be exempt from the same type of disclosure.

The DREAM Act, a bill that was once supported by a number of Republican moderates, has become toxic for ambitious GOPers ever since it was embraced by President Obama. The latest iteration of the proposal would provide a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants brought to the US as children if they're planning to graduate from college or join the military, provided they meet strict behavior requirements over a decade. It failed to clear the Senate during the 2010 lame-duck session.

During Monday night's debate, however, the Republican consensus shifted just a smidgen to the left, as both Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney endorsed the idea of a military-only DREAM Act, an idea once embraced by their fallen rival Rick Perry.

"If you live in a foreign country, and you are prepared to join the American military, you can, in fact, earn the right to citizenship by serving the United States and taking real risk on behalf of the United States," Gingrich said. "That part of the DREAM Act I would support."

"I would not sign the DREAM Act as it currently exists," Romney agreed, "but I would sign the DREAM Act if it were focused on military service."

The DREAM Act is premised on two basic arguments: Children should not be punished for the sins of their parents, and it's absurd for the United States to jettison potential high skilled workers who are not to blame for their own undocumented status. The military-only DREAM Act treats military service as a kind of punishment and levies a price for citizenship that neither Republican candidate was himself willing to pay.

The New York Police Department, currently facing criticism from Muslim and civil liberties groups over a CIA-advised program that involved "mapping" the city's Muslim enclaves, showed an anti-Muslim training video to thousands of officers, the New York Times reports. The film purports to describe the centuries-long process by which Muslims are seeking to dominate the planet, and in particular the United States, by covertly subverting the Constitution and implementing Taliban-style Islamic law.

The story was first broken by the Village Voice, but the Times' piece connects the film, The Third Jihad, and its shadowy sponsor, The Clarion Fund, to the 2012 election:

The 72-minute film was financed by the Clarion Fund, a nonprofit group whose board includes a former Central Intelligence Agency official and a deputy defense secretary for President Ronald Reagan. Its previous documentary attacking Muslims' "war on the West" attracted support from the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a major supporter of Israel who has helped reshape the Republican presidential primary by pouring millions of dollars into a so-called super PAC that backs Newt Gingrich.

Adelson's donation to Gingrich likely has something to do with their shared anti-Palestinian views, namely the notion that Palestinian national identity is "invented."

However, Gingrich isn't the only candidate with links to the Clarion Fund, who as Salon's Justin Elliott and The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg have written, is also tied to a radical Israeli settler group. One of Mitt Romney's Middle East advisers, Walid Phares, who spent much of the Lebanese civil war as a political and ideological adviser to the leadership of a Christian militant group that committed atrocities, remains on Clarion's adisory board. The aforementioned former deputy defense secretary is birther Frank Gaffney, who also sits on Clarion's advisory board and recently praised Gingrich for saying he wouldn't appoint a Muslim to his cabinet unless he or she promised not to try and "impose [Shariah] on the rest of us."

While Gingrich's formal ties to the million-dollar Islamophobia industry are stronger than Romney's, and Gingrich himself has endorsed the whole "stealth jihad" conspiracy theory, the former Massachussetts governor has nevertheless made an effort to quietly acknowledge those who believe American Muslims are quietly working to replace the Constitution with Taliban-style Islamic law (and force all of us to eat halal turkeys at Thanksgiving) by picking one of their more scholarly cohorts as an adviser on the Middle East.

Newt Gingrich puts a hand over his left ear, presumably to block out the sound of that awful rock music.

As a service to our readers, every day we are delivering a classic moment from the political life of Newt Gingrich—until he either clinches the nomination or bows out.

Newt Gingrich's ring-tone is ABBA's "Dancing Queen," so the operative question when considering his musical tastes isn't whether they're terrible, but just how that came to be. The answer, as with all things Gingrich, has to do with politics. In an interview with Frontline in 1995, his college friend, David Kramer, explained that Gingrich didn't really the see the point in music if he couldn't manipulate it for political gain:

I remember one afternoon taking the 'White Album' over there and playing it through and explaining to him what was significant about this whole experience. I'm not sure he ever figured it out. One night we went to a Jefferson Airplane concert in New Orleans and he found that very interesting—there were a lot of people there who were very excited and of course, his question was, 'Is there any political value in this?'

Sounds fun. As it happens, "Dancing Queen" actually has been appropriated for political ends. In 2010, the far-right Danish People's Party, obviously well-informed of the listening habits of 21st-century Danish youths, rewrote the lyrics to the song in an attempt to appeal to younger voters. When ABBA protested—"ABBA never allows its music to be used in a political context"—the party took the song down.

In his South Carolina victory speech, Newt Gingrich laid into President Obama and disparaged him as the "food stamp" president—as if it's a repugnant notion to help Americans when they're struggling. In any case, he inspired me to chart some data.

I calculated the percentage of the civilian noninstitutional population—anybody 17 and older who's neither in prison nor the military—receiving federal food aid. (Click on links for source data; I used the July population figures.) The red and blue bars indicate the party of the president who created that year's budget. For instance, Obama's first budget was for fiscal year 2010, which commenced in October 2009. So for the first three quarters of 2009, America was operating on a Bush budget.

So what does this tell us? Well, food stamp use is certainly higher than it's been in more than four decades. Is that because, as Gingrich claims, Obama is nurturing a culture of dependency? Hardly. It just means that more people are hurting (to the degree that a few have even resorted to illegal activities to pay the bills).

The chart also tells us that the explosion of participation in the food stamp program began with President Bush's first budget and continued all through his tenure. More Americans signed up for food assistance under Bush than have signed up under Obama—so far, anyway. And if you really want to blame presidents for soaring food stamp use, you should probably also point out that Bush had eight years to turn the trend around—including four years with backup from a solidly GOP Congress—yet failed to do so.

The steepest decline in food stamps came under President Clinton—when Gingrich was House speaker and the nation was going hog-wild with its dot-com boom. President Reagan, Gingrich's hero, whose deficit spending helped fuel a degree of prosperity, oversaw a decline in food stamp use followed by an increase that left things worse than when he took office.

In short, it's disingenous of Gingrich, and really kind of insulting to out-of-work Americans, to go after Obama on this account. The candidate is smart enough to know that the number of hungry people seeking help is a pretty good gauge of our economic health. And as the chart makes clear, neither party has a monopoly on the good times.

UPDATE (Jan. 24, 3:41 EST) — This just in. A large and growing share of food stamp households (48 percent) are working households. So much for Newt's dependency theory.

If you were a candidate, you'd have plenty of reasons to hate super-PACs: They can raise unlimited money to attack you, all while keeping a safe distance from your opponents so that they don't look like mudslingers. On the other hand, you'd also have plenty of reasons to love super-PACs: They can raise unlimited money to attack your opponents, all while keeping a safe distance from you so that you don't look like a mudslinger.

Which explains why Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich can't seem to make up their minds on whether they want to embrace or erase super-PACs. Where they and the other candidates stand on the 2012 election's big-money groups:

Mitt RomneySuper-PAC relationship status: It's complicated
Last Wednesday, Romneytold a South Carolina audience, "It's not that I don't support super-PACs. We raise money for super-PACs. We encourage super-PACs. Each candidate has done that." But during a debate just the day before, he took the opposite view: "We all would like to have super-PACs disappear, to tell you the truth…I think this has to change." And last December, Romney called super-PACs a "disaster," saying that campaigns should be able to raise unlimited funds instead: "We really ought to let campaigns raise the money they need and just get rid of these super-PACs." Yet Romney, whose affiliated super-PACs have poured $11.9 million into the race, has also said that the Supreme Court made "the correct decision" in Citizens United, the decision that paved the way for super-PACs.

Ron PaulSuper-PAC relationship status: Friends
In his book Liberty Defined, Ron Paul criticizes foes of Citizens United: "Those who attack the court's decision say that corporations and unions have no rights of free speech, following the flawed belief that government can regulate commercial speech in advertising." A page later, Paul also decries limits on campaign fundraising, even though "the amount of money being spent on elections is obscene." Pro-Paul super-PACs have spent about $360,000.

Barack ObamaSuper-PAC relationship status: Former enemies*
A week after Citizens United was decided in 2010, President Obama criticized the ruling in his State of the Union address. "Last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that, I believe, will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections," Obama declared, as Justice Samuel Alito appeared to mouth, "Not true, not true." Last July, an Obama spokesman told the Los Angeles Times that "neither the president nor his campaign staff or aides will fundraise for super-PACs" (a rule that apparently doesn't apply to his former staffers). Last week, in a Politico article detailing how the pro-Obama super-PAC Priorities USA Action is lagging behind those of his GOP rivals, an Obama campaign representative said, "I don't think the president is just ambivalent about his super-PAC. He's flat-out opposed to it." Priorities USA Action spent about $100,000 attacking Romney in South Carolina.

*Update: Obama has since decided that he and super-PACs are frenemies; his campaign plans to help fundraise for Priorities USA Action.